SURVIVING loved ones of suicides often spend many years wanting to kill them, writes Jane Rankin-Reid Mercury
IN 1983 my husband Bill swallowed a pint of vodka and the contents of a bottle of Valium before throwing himself out of a third-floor window. I overheard office workers discussing his death the following morning in a lift travelling to the top floor of a Manhattan office building. An intense feeling of nausea rose within me as the lift returned slowly to the ground to finally escape the slap of fate I’d just been handed. At first the safety of my liberal upbringing helped me accept Bill’s unexpected decision to die. It was his right to choose to live and clearly he was one of those souls who’d decided not to, I told myself. Counselling virtually eliminated my guilt about his unsatisfactory experience of existence. Eventually I stopped searching for clues about his motives. Surprisingly for the widow of a “successful” suicide, healing has made me less sympathetic than expected to others attempting or succeeding in taking their lives. That is normal too, counsellors say. Experts say that when someone who is clinically depressed finally decides to end their life, a feeling of peace descends and they become calm and relaxed. The chance to relieve their relentless emotional misery excludes all other rational thought about the consequences of suicide on family and friends. Absorbed in the solitary darkness of depression, this complete loss of perspective and the ability to see a future without anguish is symptomatic of severe mental illness. href=”http://www.news.com.au/mercury/story/0,22884,24206746-3462,00.html” title=”Read more here”>Read more here
